In the end what's supposed to be a simplification ends up being a complication in that one is stuck being able to play some files but not others, then being able to play a different set with yet a different client, etc.
Yes, the designers of UPnP have somehow managed to make it
both over-engineered and under-specified.
At that point one can just forgo the UPnP and just create a regular share which programs like Boxee or Plex will happily connect to and play from.
UPnP also falls under the same rule of thumb as IMAP mail: that people who don't realise that what they're designing is a remote filesystem, are destined to design a
crap remote filesystem.
For video it's a little bit more mixed
Yes. Squeezebox have certainly solved the audio problem; Sonos might have too, but I know less about Sonos (do you get server plug-ins like the Squeezebox ones?). If you don't care about video or photo, then you now no longer need a universal remote to control audio playback, nor an amplifier with more than one input.
Nobody that I know of has yet solved the video problem as definitively, and of course what you
actually want (because video has an audio track too) is for your audio solution and your video solution to be the same thing, so, again, no universal remote is required, and your TV and your audio amplifier both spend their entire lives switched to just one input. (Um, unless you do gaming; maybe if you do, you just need to hope that the Xbox and/or PS3 UPnP clients are worth using.)
The reason I pay attention to UPnP, is that it seems to me that whoever
does solve the video problem first, will likely do so using UPnP. The Squeezebox stuff doesn't obviously extend to video, and Sonos
is UPnP, albeit with some proprietary extensions. And even so there'll be servers that can't serve certain content, and clients that can't play certain other content. But if there's ever even so much as
one good server and
one good client, that's the problem better-solved than it has been yet.
Peter
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